The Golden idol at the top of the column weights two pounds, or about that much. I let a little bit of the sand out of the cloth bag in my right hand, setting my left hand up to clutch the prize. Everybody knows that there is a weight activated trigger at the top of the column, under the idol. Quick hands, like mine, should have no problem slipping the burlap sack of sand onto the centuries old switch before the device noticed the absence of the golden beaver. What match is the stone age for the technology of the modern world?
I was soon to find out as I got my treasure from its perch. The trap on the column was child's play to overcome, however, the door had a few surprises of its own. It had sensors on the floor that could tell if you were entering or leaving the room. Unless you hit the reset in the wall, a fulcrum release lever that I never did find, then hitting the stoned on the floor in the wrong order caused a stone to fall into place and shut the door forever.
My catlike reflexes barely got me through the doorway in front of the falling mass of sedimentary stone. With a quick roll, I was quickly on the floor of the outer room and less than an inch from the massive block sealing the temple door from all outsiders. Sand began to fill the room and I had to spring to my feet to avoid being buried. The outer door was blocked before I got to it, so I crawled the last ten feet up the air shaft to reach the outside.
When I first got into archeology, these are the things that I thought I would enjoy. Slip into the ancient temple, collect tons of gold and get awards by the hundreds. I even thought that I would get the girl. There is no limit to the distance that I was off the prize. Not that archeology is as dull as it seems to be once you have been at it for a few years.
After Ulenahidev, dull is not how I will ever describe the rigors of archeology. I can say that with confidence even though I never have gotten the girl on an adventure. You rarely find gold on a site and, even if you do, they will not let you keep it. However, you will find things that change the destiny of the world if they slip out.
Ulenahidev was not a major find. If it had been more than a common stone age dwelling, then I would not have expected to be invited since I was a novice on my second dig. Dr. Sam didn't know me from Adam and I was one of a dozen students in the labor pool. Four of us were assigned to Ulenahidev.
There were no treasure chambers in the caverns. At that period, food was all the treasure that people would have kept in their temples. Stone idols littered the floors around the main cave, as with broken shards of pottery and a few preserved animal bones. You could make out a few fire pits around the central cave. It was nothing remarkable enough to interest me and I spent the whole time thinking of the big discoveries that I was going to make later on.
Dr. Sam put me on one of the dig crews. I do not believe that he liked me. He must have taken an instant dislike to me since he assigned me to move rubble while all three of the other novices were charting drawings and cleaning artifacts. It didn't matter much to me since the job had no task that I considered worthy of my talents.
While daydreaming about how famous I was going to get, and how I would run Dr. Sam's nose in my celebrity, I broke through into the worship center of the complex. I did not know that was where I was at the time. Dr. Sam had told me to move the boulders blocking a cave entrance. It was tiring, hot work and Dr. Sam chastised me every few minutes for not being more cautious in my labors. He acted like I was going to damage the rocks that I was moving.
Inside the central cavern, the air felt much cooler than the humid place where I had been working for hours. As soon as the hole was big enough, and Dr. Sam was busy somewhere else, I slipped into the cavern. Inside, I pushed the pile of rubble out of the cave to let air and light in with me. But, I did not make the opening too large. If there was anything worth finding in that room, then I wanted the credit for it. Nobody had earned it more than I had.
It was still dark in the cave and I had dropped my flashlight while pushing the rubble out of the cave. At the time, I was still expecting traps at every turn. Every noise was another trigger that I had hit in the darkness. I kept my feet where they were while I searched the crumbling floor for the light that I had dropped. Dr. Sam was not going to see what I had uncovered before I did.
I found the light before long, although I cannot say how long it took. The fall had shifted the batteries and I had to work just to get the light to work. It was dim at first so I could only make out the fallen stones on the floor of the cave. Charcoal markings in the floor identified the fire pit. Above the fire pit, I saw the source of most of the stones on the floor. More rubble had closed up the air shaft, yet not before filling the floor with assorted debris.
Drawings had been made on the walls of the cave. Nobody used written words in those days. I started on the right, sweeping the light as far as I could moving leftward across the cave. Only the walls on the sides of me were in range of the weak light that I had been issued. To tell the truth, it looked like old cartoons from the weekend papers.
You cannot imagine how large the cave was. Still thinking that I was walking into a treasure chamber with an ancient alarm system, I walked very carefully around the fire pit to the front of the cave. I stopped when anything moved, almost believing that my life was in jeopardy. Nothing happened. It was hard to say if I was more disappointed or relieved that I made it across the cave without incident.
The front of the cave was different. Although still to far away from me to be seen clearly by my flashlight, I could make out that the image at the front of the cave had been cut into the wall of the cave. I took several slow steps toward the front of the cave, still careful of the cave floor. Looking at the near end of the carving, which was on my left, I could tell that it was better than the drawings at the back of the cave. Each of the people, depicted on their knees, could be clearly made out even after all the time which had passed since the cave had been sealed.
Enough detail remained in the people's faces that I could tell one face from another. None of the carvings was good enough to put in a modern gallery. It was just striking how well designed the carving was. Men and women could be identified from the shapes cut into the rock. Flesh and clothing could be identified in the relief.
At the far right of the carving, the only man who was not kneeling was wearing a ball cap for the Boston Yankees. I could clearly make out the pockets of his jeans. Nobody else in the relief was wearing jeans. A more careful look, from a closer perspective, allowed me to identify the make of his sneakers. The man was wearing Nike sneakers.
After I walked back to the far end of the cave, where the opening that I had cleared was, I began thinking. There was no chance that this cave had been altered. I had just opened the door after a collapse had sealed it centuries earlier. No other openings led into that chamber. That relief would have taken hours or more to cut.
With a sip from my canteen, I recognized the problem. It came as such a surprise to me that I went back to look at the relief three more times. The image of a man of an era no earlier than mine was clearly in the relief. I had to find Dr. Sam.
Dr. Sam was in his trailer at the entrance to the Ulenahidev dig. He was busy and he did not like me. If he had not seen what I saw in the mirror behind his head, then he would have dismissed me from the site as much as from the trailer. His eyes froze on my form as though he feared that I had come to kill him.
From my reflection, I could say that he was justified in his assessment. My hair was a mess, however, that is always the case with me. I looked every bit as horrified as I felt. Nobody would have gone through the trouble, contaminating the site, to pull a trick like this on me. It was the biggest shock that I had ever had.
"What is it, Tom?"
My breath had only partially returned to me. "Dr. Sam. I saw something. In the cave."
"Calm down, my boy. Take a breath and have a sip of water. Tell me all about it."
"A man," I gasped. It was hard to hold the paper cup much less drink from it. "These people worshiped him."
"What are you saying, Tom?"
"A modern man. These people worshiped a man wearing a baseball cap, jeans and Nike Sneakers."
"Show me."
The walk back to the chamber took a few minutes longer than my walk away from it. When Dr. Sam and I got back, the other students were with us. I led the way through the cramped opening and past the old fire pit. Dr. Sam's flashlight was much better than mine and made it easier to walk around the cave.
My greatest fear was that I had dreamed the whole thing up and that the relief would not be there when I got back with Dr. Sam. That turned out not to be the case. However, that was not much of a consolation. I had found something that could not be what it was.
"I swear that I did not change this relief. This chamber was unaltered, as all records of this dig will show."
All of the students looked over my find with eager eyes. Most of them, meaning two, started at the left side of the relief as I had. The man in jeans was not so much larger than the others that he should catch your eye more than anybody else in the carving. You saw the odd man, being worshiped by everybody else carved into the wall, only when you looked at him.
"Calm down, my boy." Dr. Sam then pulled a chisel out of his back pocket. He had always had something in his back pocket, on the site, but I had always assumed that it was his wallet. A few quick taps from the chisel, using a mallet that I had not seen earlier, and the offending image was part of the rubble on the cave floor. Our leader, the only real archeologist on the site, destroyed the offending part of the relief without a second though.
No word in my mind needed to be spoken aloud. It was like a secret that I alone had not been let in on, even though none of the student archeologists was likely to have been told. They do not teach you to destroy artifacts in any school that I had studied in. Textbooks do not detail what parts of history have to be edited out. Dr. Sam's actions came as a shock to me, less only than the horror of finding the strange man in the relief.
"We find these things all the time, students. You will find it best not to talk about them."
"But what does it mean, professor?"
Dr. Sam wasn't eager to answer and he droned the response so calmly that the very question seemed to bore him. "What does it mean to you?"
There was an answer that I gave Dr. Sam, although I would be so embarrassed to admit to it at my current, matured age. My answer got me removed from that dig and the next two projects. Dr. Sam was right in that it is best not to talk about those things. When you do, in whatever dark corner of the world you find yourself in, it adds new meaning to the phrase, "history is written after the fact."